Craigs Blog

Reading tipping point at the minute and must say it’s very interesting – enjoying it. Whilst reading it I was musing that the adoption of facebook is a clear epidemic style occurance – as is the now 10 million subscribers to world of warcraft. It’s very interesting that these events are marked by a massive rise, plateau and just as swift a decline.

Very interesting book though.

this little enterprise began when the box started playing up. We got some intermittent issues like the recordings would stop part way through, the play back would get choppy or the box would just turn itself off. A few calls to different people on the sky helpline revealed a secret menu – oooo. To get there you press the sky services button on the remote (near the top), choose 4 for system set up, then press 0, 1, “Select” on the remote. This opens up a few interesting things. So if you’re having trouble you can do a sky+ planner rebuild.

sky+planner rebuild

this seems to reorganise things on the sky+ disk. it generally reboots the box and usually keeps all your recordings (it lost all mine once). This generally fixed our issues for a wee while when we did this.

system reset

this option seems to clean the system and delete your recordings but it is very effective at getting you back to a sensible state – i.e. one where recordings work again (woo).

replace the disk

we took this route after a chat with the support guy who said the disks tend to fail after a while and we’ve had our box for some time. He offered to replace the box for £100 + engineer fee – £150 or so to get me back to the level of service I was paying for now??? madness I tell you. Well I had heard of people upgrading the boxes to increase disk space so I thought lets repair it myself and get an improved system to boot.

this thread on sky+ upgrades offers a good overview of the work required. I identified that I had a pace v2 box from the description. this list of working hard drives directed me to by this hard drive on ebay . I went to maplins and got a security bit toolset (needed to open the box) and followed the instructions here for the V2

About 40 minutes later we’ve got 6 times the space and a working box. I didn’t do any copying of data (we watched most stuff before we switched). So far – all’s well and all for £60.

have a look at my links on the subject here

went smooth as a breeze and seems to have fixed the annoying intermittent errors we were seeing with recordings. I like it long time.

Following on from here ,directlinebusiness.com gets another product – keep an eye on it.

Screen shots courtesy of http://www.webshotspro.com/

Editted from here

Additions: Added community applications

Today I was talking to one of my colleagues about communities and virtual places and stuff – I’ll leave it to him to comment on his observations. I described my view of things and thought it worth noting them here:

In my view there are three four types of online community ‘places’ at this time:

1. Community support tools
2. Community Applications
3. Worlds
4. Games

Community support tools are things like facebook , linkedin , bulletin boards. These sort of places offer existing communities a place to communicate. The frame of reference for the community is outside the tool, i.e. you remember when we were at school together?

Community applications are things like zopa . This site allows a community of lenders to lend to a community of borrowers. I distinguish applications from the others in terms of the role of the application – the support tool allows a community to communicate and are often used by the other virtual places, but an application actually serves some specific purpose that could not be fulfilled except by a community.

Worlds are things like second life . They have a world in which players interact. Existing communities can use this as a tool but the world also provides an internal frame of reference i.e. have you seen the bank over here in second life?

Finally games provide a world in which one has objectives defined by the game, and rules governing it’s play. World of Warcraft being an example. Whilst existing communities can come to a game frequently ad hoc communities are formed to solve objectives in the game, i.e. I need to kill hogger, can you come help me?

Just a few thoughts…

Today I was talking to one of my colleagues about communities and virtual places and stuff – I’ll leave it to him to comment on his observations. I described my view of things and thought it worth noting them here:

In my view there are three types of online community ‘places’ at this time:

1. Community support tools
2. Worlds
3. Games

Community support tools are things like facebook , linkedin , bulletin boards. These sort of places offer existing communities a place to communicate. The frame of reference for the community is outside the tool, i.e. you remember when we were at school together?

Worlds are things like second life . They have a world in which players interact. Existing communities can use this as a tool but the world also provides an internal frame of reference i.e. have you seen the bank over here in second life?

Finally games provide a world in which one has objectives defined by the game, and rules governing it’s play. World of Warcraft being an example. Whilst existing communities can come to a game frequently ad hoc communities are formed to solve objectives in the game, i.e. I need to kill hogger, can you come help me?

Just a few thoughts…

Windows vistas infuriating lack of fitting together with cygwin properly means that the directories I’d like to back up are owned by Administrators – which in this case is a user and not a group. No group is assigned to the directories so I can’t get at them from scripts rendering the rsync bit useless – arrgh!

hmm.. how to back up.

I want to back up to a remote internet site – figure its better than disks stored in a box under the stairs. Dreamhost is giving me oodles of space and stuff so why not there? well, actually finding a tool to ship files to my store of ssh actually happens to be quite hard. The comes something that makes it easy – online services with their own tools – ooooo. This article seems to suggest mozy is a good bet, whilst suggesting others – but should i pay a few more pounds a month for more online disk space?

oh woe – anyone know of a good remote back up utility out there?

Edit: oo shiny how to use rsync article

I went to see how things were going over at www.projectzero.org and found the message below. Oh dear…

---

Software error:

flush(): couldn’t store datastr: store(): couldn’t close ’/var/twiki/cgisess_04260d499ba48debb25755e1c0cb3d8f’: No space left on device at /zerogpfs/stlzro1/wiki/lib/TWiki/Client.pm line 451.

For help, please send mail to the webmaster ([no address given]), giving this error message and the time and date of the error.

---

I thought there’d be more activity by now to be honest. The right tags come up in del.icio.us but google doesn’t list anything linking to it and the only non-ibm post I’ve pointed to doesn’t really talked about the technology?

I actually found the course to be very relevant. I was a little dubious but essentially it provides a number of complementary processes and frameworks to put together simple powerful documents swiftly and effectively. I genuinely think this year I’ll save the man-days I spent on the course if I use the techniques from the course.

Word of note – it is a business writing course. It’s designed to allow you to get content out swiftly and in a readily accessible format. It’s not a creative writing or technical writing course. It is however absolutely relevant to me and I’d recommend it.

Some interesting articles here from ongoing and a reference article here . The latter points out an interesting distinction between middleware architecture and Web Architecture and is something I’m intending to read more on. The former points to the vendor adoption route to technology adoption, i.e. just as vendors introduced “standards” to JavaScript which the community at large was obliged to adhere to, so Microsoft in it’s position of power has expressed significant influence on the whole WS-* stuff.

Seems ruby got in a funny state - sorry to those trying to read and being unable to today.

Seems my post Top healer in SWStats appears in the list of URLs returned. Very little idea why but hey.

Only noticed as the feedburner stats tell me what folks searched on to hit my site. most odd.

hi,

As part of my self appraisal activities I felt that I was weak in my business analysis skills, or at least there was an opportunity to leverage those kind of skills in my current role. As such I’m currently doing the ISEB Organisational Context course with a view to getting the Business analysis diploma . A good measure of if I’m learning something is if I could have passed the exam without doing the course – I get the feeling this wasn’t the case so the course will do me good. A measure of if the course was useful will be how much I use it’s content but I guess that will come later. Still, for now I need to do some reading up and I got 1.5 days of course and exam on Wednesday.

all good fun.

My ISEB tagged links on del.icio.us

Seems I have to post this Technorati Profile to claim my blog. I added the wee searchy thing on the right too...