While browsing the web for details on an even fancier catflap (despite having an infra-red key-operated catflap, the local cats are still stealing Meowth‘s food…), I found someone that had one.
That, however, pales into insignificance with this rather lovely bit of hackery: a Internet-enabled (IPV6!) cat feeder. Wow. Even better, it’s running Linux 
As we say in networking circles:
Gigaport is administratively down, line protocol is down
That, my friends, is what happens when something is shut down by the system administrator. Perhaps because it isn’t needed, or it’s actions are having an undesireable effect on the network as a whole. Or perhaps not, I’m merely speculating.
Walsall Regeneration Company has been shut down after funding was withdrawn. Hopefully Mike Bird will now have more time on his hands to continue the sterling job of leading the council.
Oh Noes. Who will save us now? We can’t build any more Tesco stores, surely, and we already have an ugly Asda store. Waitrose won’t touch Walsall, so someone had better get Netto on speedial.
We’ve just been reminded why we don’t go to Wales very often: It absolutely pissed it down for much of our time there, so we came back early. I’m famed for phrases like “It’s only a bit of water, stop moaning”, but even I have limits, and yes, it always rains in Wales, but 3 days of almost continuous heavy rain and then more showers….
It wasn’t a disaster, but we were out in the car more than intended, on foot less than intended, and one evening couldn’t face leaving the cottage. Beautiful scenery, some nice roads, and a few nice places to go, but it felt like Rob McKenna was on holiday too.
edit: Pictures at the gallery. They’re not all rain, but 283 and 285 are only hours apart…
It’s been a busy one: Friday night was a write-off thanks to a trip to that London that went on longer than hoped, and on Saturday we visited Pelsall Carnival, visiting a few pubs as well. The carnival was busy- congratulations to the organisers- though the rubbish on the Common this morning was a sight to behold.
Today we’ve been out with friends to leafy, up-it’s-own-arse Chesire, to visit Little Moreton Hall, and grab some lunch on the way back, the drive being mostly painless, despite the person that seemed unable to see a bright red car….
I’ve had this one simmering away gently for some time, but @walsallcouncil finally pushed me past the edge today with this on twitter:
Good to see the launch of superfast fibre-based broadband in Walsall. Download speeds of up to 40 mbs help with the town’s regeneration.
They’re talking about a regeneration scheme: Walsall’s [cough] Gigaport.
I have a few issues with this. First of all, mention Gigaport to me, or probably any other geek, and the first thing we’ll think of is this, or similar. Presumably the Giga bit is meant to sound all modern and hi-tech.
Well, it was. around 10 years ago, when I first started installing switches with a 1Gbit/sec backbone, or when a 1GB disk wasn’t a flash drive you’d buy for £5. Now? 1GBit/sec is the comfortable standard, with 10Gbit becoming what you’d install on a new job. Still, we’ll pass over that particular misnomer for now.
The next item that really annoys me? It’s that bit about 40mbps and high speed. Frankly, that’s not a high speed link anymore, and certainly doesn’t deserve all the balls about Fibre Optic tech. Firstly, it’s ‘up to’. Secondly, you can now get ‘up to’ 24Mbit on ADSL- that, boys and girls, is over the ancient old copper that connects your telephone and was originally designed for low-bandwidth analogue speech. Virgin Media have ‘up to’ 50Mbit service running over co-axial copper on a domestic service (despite what VM’s adverts say, the last stage to your house is not fibre), so the fibre-optic bit is frankly, smoke and mirrors. I have ‘up to’ 20MBit here at home.
In my last job, we had 100Mbit back in around 2002, and my current workplace has a 100Mbit bearer, throttled to 50. And that’s not ‘up to’. That’s tested, proven, with no contention, and it supplies one business in a semi-rural setting. Come back when the Gigaport is running 100Gbit everywhere, and then I’ll be impressed.
But what is really starting to nag at me is the lack of substance, and the hollow-sounding promises of a shiny new perfect world, all created by what sounds to me like a bit of office space, a datacentre, internet infrastructure that is somewhat less than cutting-edge and a copy of Wolverhampton Science Park, more than 10 years too late. is this really going to regenerate the town? Really? There’s lots and lots of office space around the town, and if you talk nicely to a decent ISP, any one of them will connect you to the Internet at speeds ranging from a few MBit up to 100, practically anywhere.
Finally: those of us working in networking have a quick and dirty way of checking for crap being talked. In Cisco terms, we’d do something like this:
#sh int fa4
FastEthernet4 is up, line protocol is up
Hardware is PQUICC_FEC, address is 0019.3011.de34 (bia 0019.3011.de34)
Internet address is 111.222.333.444
MTU 1500 bytes, BW 100000 Kbit/sec, DLY 100 usec,
reliability 255/255, txload 1/255, rxload 1/255
Encapsulation ARPA, loopback not set
Keepalive set (10 sec)
Full-duplex, 100Mb/s, 100BaseTX/FX
ARP type: ARPA, ARP Timeout 04:00:00
Last input 00:00:01, output 00:00:06, output hang never
Last clearing of "show interface" counters never
Input queue: 0/75/0/0 (size/max/drops/flushes); Total output drops: 0
Queueing strategy: fifo
Output queue: 0/40 (size/max)
5 minute input rate 2000 bits/sec, 1 packets/sec
5 minute output rate 1000 bits/sec, 1 packets/sec
4275131 packets input, 2252532395 bytes
Received 167875 broadcasts, 0 runts, 0 giants, 0 throttles
0 input errors, 0 CRC, 0 frame, 0 overrun, 0 ignored
0 watchdog
0 input packets with dribble condition detected
3654406 packets output, 440792127 bytes, 0 underruns
0 output errors, 0 collisions, 3 interface resets
See that bit about 0 input errors, 0 CRC etc? That means the line is fairly clean, though I notice there’s been 3 resets, where there has been too much crap, so the router has shut down and restarted that port. Funny that. Maybe the CRC checking isn’t working for Walsall Regeneration Company.
We took advantage of the weather and had a walk up the canal to The Fingerpost, and passing by the Brownhills Canal Festival. If anything, it was actually a little hot for walking, but sitting at a canalside (both at the pub and when we had a break at the festival) was very nice, and I was able to quench my thirst with isotonic Stella.
The festival itself was pretty well attended for something taking place on a match day of that tedious sport known as football, and an F1 race. The weather must have helped.
So, then, Sir Peter North has produced a report looking for the legal blood-alcohol limit for driving to be lowered, as ‘hundreds’ of lives could be saved. The Express and Star ran the story on the front page, and followed it up with this rather sad tale of people whose lives were changed for the worse by a convicted drink driver.
Personally, I don’t see any need for change at all, despite the many people whose lives are shattered by drink-drivers. All the death, injury, carnage etc, as detailed in our papers: and let’s be clear about this, that’s speaking as a driver and drinker who rarely combines the two, and if I do, I’d still be way below even the new proposed limit.
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I don’t normally do out-and-out plugs, but if, like me, you fancy a pint (and maybe a meal) with the guarantee of no bloody football, The Fingerpost is promising exactly that. It’s not a bad pub, either.
Anyone that knows me well will know that phrases like ‘proccess efficiency’ and ‘streamlined business processes’ will send me running for a claw hammer with which to viciously beat the speaker. So often today “efficiency” means “cutting the funding”, and anything done to “benefit customer service” is quite the reverse: it’s little more than an excuse to trot out a load of managment bullshit, knacker the service, and give someone’s private sector buddies a pile of cash.
However:
By dear sweet baby Jebus, Walsall Manor NHS needs *something* doing to stop wasting time and money quite so well. It’s so stunningly poor that it looks bad compared to the rest of the NHS.
I’ve had some experience myself (I gave up trying to get any useful contact out of the Physiotherapy lot last year), but recent experience with my dear Stymistress just drives it home. It was a routine appointment, for a regular clinic- not an emergency, so you’d think that you could run appointments roughly to time. After all, if you’ve done it for a while, you’d know on average how long an appointment takes. Build in a few minutes reserve, book as many appointments as you can fit in.
So then, we turn up at around 3:30. The appointment is timed to be at 3:55. See that? That’s planning, that is: we left 1:05 for the journey, knowing it should take around 45-50 min. You take account of what is likely, leave a little room to move, and work to that.
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